Big Fish Wings & Things
817 Martin Luther KingF Jr. Street SEFriday nights in Grand Rapids.
We’re a little short staffed right now and to fill the Friday night slot, it automatically goes to the person on call for the weekend. Last weekend was my weekend so I got the Friday night slot.
I didn’t have much to do. In fact, I didn’t really do anything all other than sit in the office just in case a problem arose that I would have to deal with.
No such problem arose so I essentially sat there and collected my paycheck.
Around 5:00 I told my supervisor I was hungry and I was going to clock out for my meal break and go outside of the building to find something to eat. I had passed a spot on the Southeast side of Grand Rapids a few times that jumped out to me but I didn’t have time to stop those nights. I had the time on this night.
Big Fish Wings & Things is a small, mostly take out restaurant near the corner of MLK Jr Street (formerly Franklin Street) and Eastern Avenue. The white building is very distinct looking with large columns out front that make it look like this used to be a bank or something. The last restaurant I remember being in here was a version of Sandmanns that I never stopped at. Most of the time I worked in Grand Rapids (2010-2017) the building was empty. It was always a noticeable building so I was always surprised there was nothing in there.
There’s a small parking lot to the building right off of MLK Street so parking isn’t a problem in this high traffic area.
The restaurant is counter service although they seemed to do a lot of their business via order and delivery apps. I walked in and found a menu on the counter right away. It’s pretty simple. Fried chicken and fish dominate the menu. There are so many of these places in Grand Rapids but very few in Kalamazoo. I love the simplicity and deliciousness of fried chicken wings that these type of places offer.
I put in an order for 6 whole wings and fries. The lone employee went straight to making the food without ringing me up right away. I knew it was going to be a few minutes so I took a seat at one of the two nearby pub tables. You can eat in if you want, but like I mentioned early, most of the business I saw coming and going was delivery drivers.
It took a little over ten minutes and the cook came out with a Styrofoam box of food. He wanted me to look at it before he rang it up. Once I was happy with it, I went over to a table near the register and put some hot sauce on the wings and some seasoning on the fries while he rang it in to the register. He rang it up as a “basket” so the total price was just a little over $15.
When I got back to the office, I popped open the box of food. I love these places because you get a lot of food at a pretty decent price. Like a lot of things, the cost of chicken has gone up the last few years so this plate is a little more expensive than I’m used to paying for it, but I love the crispy fried chicken wings that places like Big Fish specialize in.
I jumped in to the fries first because they looked a little limp and I didn’t want them to get limper. These fries definitely could have been cooked a little longer to make them crispier but they were fine. These are simple out of the bag, frozen battered fries. I added on some lemon pepper seasoning and a little bit of hot sauce which made them better. A longer fry would have improved them some as well.
The chicken were fairly big pieces of wings that are breaded and deep fried. I love the crispiness of this kind of wing. It’s so different from a Buffalo style wing. It’s, simply, fried chicken but the wings are slightly bigger than you would get in like an 8 piece from Popeyes. I didn’t go super heavy on the hot sauce but I put enough on so I would get a little bit of the peppery feeling in each bite.
I wish we had more places like this in Kalamazoo. There’s Fresh Fish & Fry on Riverview but that’s really the only one. I do hit up that place occasionally just to get wings like this.
Grand Rapids, on the other hand, has a number of places like this. Big Fish Wings & Things is a solid entry to the fried food ecosystem. The building is what caught my eye but the food is what will bring me back.
SW Michigan Dining 